Non Veritas
by Laryna6
Summary: X series crackfic. Axl won a bet, and now Zero has to drink at a party. Except Zero can't get drunk. Fortunately for everyone else, HE doesn't know that. A tale of rites of passage, embarrassing your superior officers and Alia's best birthday party ever. With lasting consequences for X and Zero's relationship.
1. Non Veritas

_Craaaack. I haven't managed to do a real crack oneshot for this fandom since Gender Roles. I love my crack._

_Disclaimer: I don't own Rockman/Megaman, X or otherwise, or any associated properties that appear in this fic. No infringement intended or money made._

* * *

"How on earth did you manage to convince Zero to do this?"

"I scored a perfect on the marksmanship trial," Axl told X happily as he dragged him along. "So he owed me something. It was either this or having him dress up like a female model so people could take pictures." Many, many people had offered Axl bribes if he picked the second one, but Axl thought, and most of the guys agreed, that Zero could use this one more.

"You'd have had a better chance of getting him to put on the dress." Since Zero didn't give any sort of damn about that sort of thing, or at least that was what he pretended after having put up with comments on his appearance for years. "Unless he figured out that it won't work on him."

Axl skidded to a halt and let out a squawk. "What?"

"It wouldn't work on the two of us, either. 'Replibeer' uses a specific form of hacking nanites. They're configured for the average reploid. Zero's systems would chew them up the way they do the virus, you function too differently from a reploid for it to work on you, and my anti-hacking protection is too powerful."

"…You mean I can't get drunk?" Axl looked crestfallen. "But, but, it's like a rite of passage and everything!"

X patted Axl on the shoulder. "Axl, you walked right up to Sigma and shot him in the face. No one is questioning your right to be a hunter, not after something like that." It was widely agreed that the kid had big metaphorical brass ones.

"…So he tricked me?" Axl knew fair was fair, he tricked people so it was only fair when they tricked him, but he'd worked really hard to get that perfect! Zero had seemed really proud of him. "Wait, _does_ he know? He said it was okay only if we both were at the party, since we're immune. And that it you said it was medically contraindicted, then he couldn't."

"Now that I think about it, it's possible he doesn't know," X said thoughtfully. "And it's a documented phenomenon among humans and immune-atypical reploids, like Signas, that thinking that you're drunk can induce drunken behavior. That would almost be the best of both worlds, wouldn't it?" Zero might be a little more honest and impulsive without actually being out of control. "He _could _use something that would help him unwind." X looked at Axl conspiratorially.

Axl grinned. "And if he doesn't get drunk, or even think he got drunk, I can still put him in the dress? Alia has this one that she _really _wants to see him in, she says it'd be great."

"Zero has a very aesthetically-pleasing physical design, and Alia does wonderful makeovers," X agreed. "Have you managed to copy him yet?"

"No." Axl shook his head. "I can't figure either of you guys out. It's like you're not all there, or something. Well, _that's_ obvious, but I meant something else."

X laughed.

"Who else has Alia done makeovers for?" Axl asked, hoping for funny stories.

"Half the spotters, Iris when she decided that she didn't want to look the same as her twin brother…"

* * *

"Are you sure it's okay for both of us to be drinking?"

X laughed. "Zero, we're in the middle of headquarters, there are other hunters here, and there's a third immune person now. You don't need to be _that _paranoid." He took a glass. "And I really have been curious about what they've done to simulate the tastes of normal beverages."

* * *

"He makes me want to tear my hair out!" Zero gestured wildly at Axl with the arm that wasn't over X's shoulders. "X, you need to be more careful. X, don't try to give first aid until you've brought them back here to be tested. X, you need to not be so _damn _trusting. And does he ever listen to me?"

X almost giggled. "No." This was really nice, just the camaraderie and how fun it was to see Zero like this. Maybe he was experiencing a bit of this psychosomatic drunkenness himself? Well, he should pretend to, anyway.

"See?"

* * *

"No, Axl, no. Seriously. Bad idea. Never date a spotter, never. Back me up here, X."

"But she's really nice when she's not telling me what to do, and…"

"Zero's right on this one, I'm afraid Axl. Spotters are never not on duty, and they're trained to be extremely…" X tried to find a diplomatic word.

"They're trained to be cast-iron bitches who tell you how to do every single little thing and won't take no for an answer. When they've been around for a few years, then _maybe _they learn to stop applying that to their personal lives, but seriously, Axl. You _hate _taking orders. Never date a rookie spotter, never. That way, they date _each other _and we have pretty snuggling female models to look at." Zero pointed at the couch under the palm tree as an example.

* * *

"I want your _hair,_" Alia told Zero, refusing to let go of it. "How did your builder afford to make something like this, it's a work of art!" She buried her face in it. "Mmm, it's so soft… I want it… Can I have it the next time you get blown up? Please?"

"Sure, they'll just make me a new one anyway." He waved his cup at her, some of it spilling over the sides. "Isn't it great?" Zero told Axl happily. "Learn how to copy this, and you'll have female models falling all over you too." He walked back to where they were serving the booze, with Alia following him, happily rubbing it against her cheeks.

* * *

"I miss Iris. She had this cute little beret, and this little upturned nose, and she was like X, only cuter." Zero told Axl. "She was newbuilt, and she actually listened to me! Except about the not letting all humans be killed thing. And sucking it up and just killing mavericks the way X does. Well, Colonel was the sucking it up and just shooting people part of her. Which sucked because she was _really _hot when she was trying to kill stuff, and she only actually did that once and it was me, which meant no sex, and..." Zero started to tear up, and switched from having one arm around Axl's shoulders to having both arms wrapped around X. "Iris…"

X hugged him back, rocking a little. "I know, Zero, I know."

He'd been hoping this would happen, it had been years and Zero still hadn't let it out of his system.

X hadn't expected Zero to shift his grip and start kissing him.

X hadn't expected Zero kissing him to make him weak in the knees. He'd known that Zero was chased after, but Zero's only serious relationship had been Iris.

Zero pulled back, looking as though he was going to force himself back to his senses.

"Are you really that good, or do I just have that little basis for comparison?" X pulled him back. He was the son of a scientist, after all.

"Yes, yes, yes!" They heard Layer scream in the background. "I'm rich! They're doing it, they're _finally _doing it, and I had a hundred zenny on tonight! Axl, I love you!" She tackled him.

Or tried to. "Zero, help!"

"Axl, turn into Palette! No, Alia!" Zero was distracted by the potential for a catfight.

X sighed, shaking his head.

So did half the room. It was really kind of creepy.

* * *

"I wish Iris was alive. And then you could turn into her, Axl."

"No way!"

Zero snorted. "Like you could turn me down. And Iris was almost as hard to turn down as X is. Iris and X and, and two Irises! Three, if X had decent hair. Whyyyy couldn't Dr. Light have made you decent hair? They had the technology, unless mine was just better." He rolled over on the couch, looking over at where was Lifesaver pitifully. "Hey, stupid doctor!"

"Zero, don't call people you're trying to get to do you favors stupid." X sat on him. For some reason, it seemed as though that would teach him a lesson.

Zero, the chief unarmed combat instructor, easily twisted around under X so that he was pinned. "You ask him for me. Nobody can tell you no."

"Sigma can," X pointed out, feeling a bit spinny, probably from the sudden movement.

"_I _can't." Zero nuzzled at his cheek, getting comfortable on top of him. "Going around wearing just human clothes is stupid. Your armor has all your weapons and defense systems. Stupid. Comfy, though."

"Comfy's nice." If X was a human, Zero's armor would be digging into him annoyingly.

"Hey, copycat-"

"-Stop calling me that!"

"Look at this!" Zero sat up so that his weight was off X's chest and he could try to take his shirt off.

"What _are _you doing?" X wondered, letting him do it just because it was funny.

"He's got nipples and a belly button! Seriously, who designs an android with those? Nothing down below, though. Dr. Light was _weeeird, _huh?"

"Un?" Alia looked up from where she was draped over Layer and unsteadily walked over.

"That's a very well-sculpted chest," one of the rookies who had consumed less than the rest by virtue of being on the dance floor most of the night complimented X. They'd still drunk enough to be tilting a little from side to side.

"And he blushes… Aww, you're not blushing."

X didn't, but he did giggle. "I'm used to being examined, Zero."

"But I want to show Axl that you blush," Zero said petulantly.

"Why don't you make me?" X dared him.

"Alright, you asked for it!"

"Yes!" Alia cheered. "Take it off! Take it all off! This is the best birthday party ever! Axl, I'm going to kiss you!"

Axl decided what the heck.

* * *

"Tell my unit I'm not going to be there today, I have a hangover," Zero commed Axl to say hurriedly, hanging up before Axl could argue or crack a joke.

Axl knew that he really _should _tell Zero that it had all been psychosomatic, but last night had been _really _great (and hilarious), and X's birthday was next month.

Alia yawned, petting his hair distractedly as she felt around in the bed for her own com unit, to check the time. Axl cuddled up to her.

Um, yeah, definitely doing this again.

* * *

_The several million zenny betting pool on the nature of X and Zero's relationship and if/when they will get a clue figures in another of my fics, X's Virus. This does not take place in the universe of my fic Gender Roles (since X, Zero, Iris and Alia are not an established sort-of-foursome), but some of the concepts addressed in that fic figure in this one (the key one being that reploids _do not have human gender_, just aesthetics). Also they have the same brand of crack humor, although this one's less on the science side._

_I tend to give Zero a rather strong aesthetic preference for female models because Iris was in many ways 'X Lite' as opposed to X Light. She (plus Colonel) was even specifically built to be just like X! And it's her failure to be like him, to possess his strength, that's why Zero basically rejects her and her dream as she's dying. The one difference between the two of them that might possibly have been helpful in overcoming barriers to a relationship (X would have been in some ways taboo due to being Zero's former student, but Iris was very young and emotionally unstable, and I'd like to think that would have made Zero worried about the relationship being destructive for her, just an outgrowth of her trying to be like X) that I can see is that she was a female model. _

_The question 'what am I fighting for' is answered in Zero series: Zero fights for specific people that he believes in and wants to protect. Human cultural gender roles would probably have very odd impacts on another species derived from ours for whom they were entirely optional labels. Hunters who choose to be female models also choosing staying on base where it's safer, as spotters... Zero wants to keep his important people safe, and that would overlap oddly with human ideas of gender. I tend to see the fight at the end of X5 as, 'No, _you _go back to base where it's safe,_' _more than anything. _

_Alia I tend to see as the Roll of the X series, and Roll, especially in the manga, is quite the Queen of that household... No, species, in a fairly awesome way. The Alia of the 4koma strips has some resemblance to that characterization. I ship Axl/Cinnamon/Marino more than Axl/Alia, but hey. For a species without risk of pregnancy and so on, I hope there'd be little stigma attached to social bonding sex between friends (which is one of the things we have it for), unless they got our hang-ups._


	2. Costume Party Omake 1

_Short version: think of this and the next five chapters as an omake._

_Long version: At the end of the oneshot, I mentioned X's birthday, and then I found myself writing something to reference the Sleeping Beauty joke, and then it tried to grow a plot. I had it in my documents folder for ages, working on it on and off but not really seriously because it was a non-serious fic with pretentions and I have too many projects, but today I decided to finish it off and start posting it. Since it's basically a sequel/crack omake to Non Veritas, I decided to add it on to that oneshot instead of starting a new fic on the site. _

_Like _The Firebrand_, this is already complete and getting posted weekly. Unlike _The Firebrand, _this was crack to begin with and then started being fluffy seriousness. _The Firebrand_ was going to be a serious look at gender stereotypes in action and turned into cracky seriousness. There's also the zombie virus fic that is nowhere near being done. That one's eight chapters in and pretty serious so far. _

_Perhaps I'm getting these done and posted because I wasn't able to write for like the last half of November and all of December. Might be a binge after going through withdrawal._

* * *

"Whoa. Is that a wig?" Axl tugged on it.

No one had quite gotten the idea of 'personal space' across to him yet, X noticed. Most of the base had a hard time saying no to Axl, because he was _immune_.

Their idolization of Zero tended to manifest in, well, idolization. Countless crushes, newbuilts practically swooning if he looked their way or inwardly panicking about whether or not their armor was polished and so on because the Crimson Hunter was looking at them! And so on.

Zero liked that they gave him space, and told anyone who treated him with too much deference that they were a hunter (which practically anyone Zero spent any time with was) and they should show some backbone. Which just made them idolize him more. Anything Zero asked for, people would rush to give him, and since he was the most senior of the unit commanders, when he was acting in his official capacity in an emergency, there was only one person on earth with the legal authority to tell him no. And Zero knew it.

"I thought only your buster could copy stuff?" Tug.

"It's not copying, Axl," X told him.

While Zero was untouchable, X had taken some care to show that he had feet of clay, because being worshipped was extremely painful. He couldn't stand to be looked at as a hero, someone who would save them all, by children when he knew that so many of them wouldn't survive the year. So he was regarded as a walking antique as much as an ancient hero, someone who had needed that time off. Every hunter who had made it to their second year understood needing a break. It made X human, or reploid anyway.

Which wasn't technically true. He wasn't_ a_ reploid, he was _the_ android. Well, one of two androids, but that didn't make things any better.

"Move, Axl," Alia told him, wielding a hairbrush she'd managed to scare up somewhere. "What did you do, sleep on this?"

"It took more energy and materials than usual, so I spent the night in a recharge capsule," X told her.

That _was _the smart thing to do, Alia had to admit, but it was going to make her job harder. "You might want to turn off the pain sensors on your head. Dr. Light may have given you the ability to regrow your hair, but you don't seem to have Zero's anti-tangle defenses." She shook a can of detangler.

Axl watched, fascinated, as Alia went to work dealing with X's matted hair.

"If only we could duplicate your systems." She was so envious. Well, there were more important reasons why they needed to figure out how to replicate X more accurately, the most important one being his _immunity_, but they were _not thinking about that _right now. There wasn't a war on, it was almost time for a party and it was important to have these little oases of normalcy, this ability to pretend that they weren't in a losing war against the virus and the crazies like Lumine that the virus had inspired.

If X's research into the virus before the seventh war had turned up anything, Alia knew that he wasn't going to tell her. She could be infected, too. But replicating Lumine had come to worse than nothing, the same as Doppler's vaccine, and it would be nice if there was _some _hope. The virus _was _weakening, and Lumine had actually finished off Sigma, but it was still infecting people, still producing crazies, even if they were (usually) less intelligent crazies without Sigma's mental traits implanted in them. Still, they were _unpredictable_ by the same measure. Not that they'd been very successful at predicting what Sigma would do.

Alia scolded herself for thinking about work right now.

"So you didn't change your shape or copy anything, you just told your hair to grow, like if it had been burned off, and didn't tell it to stop growing until it was this long?" Axl found that really weird.

"It's like how human hair works, only faster. Well, human hair grows constantly and if they want to form it into a specific shape, they need to cut and do other things to it, like Alia is doing now," X tried to explain in small words.

Axl had a historical database, but he really understood next to nothing about how humans or other reploids worked. So he tended to poke everything and ask odd questions. It was strange that he had more of a child's perspective on things than those built months after him… unless you knew how his unique mental configuration worked.

X approved of Axl's inquisitive nature and independent thought, but he probably would have been a lot more annoying to the rest of the hunters if he weren't immune. Immune people were regarded as special, and unique, and that was viewed as a good thing, something that saved lives and enabled heroism. Axl's questions weren't just humored, but encouraged, which was good, but…

Axl was in very real danger of getting spoiled.

While a lot of people thought of parties as days off, for X they were anything but. _Especially _his own birthday party, when he was the center of attention. Still, "A costume party was a good idea, Axl."

"I wish I could do a better job of going as you, though." Axl still couldn't copy him. "Who are you going as, anyway?"

"I think I'll leave that up to Alia."

Alia said, "Without your helmet, you look a lot like… her. So I'll have to dye your hair or something."

"Who's 'her?'"

"Iris," X told Axl. "She and her brother were built when Dr. Cain was hoping that if he could make a reploid who thought like me, they would be immune. Since that just wasn't possible, not only did their strength of will turn out to be weaker than a civilian's, but the forming consciousness split apart. Iris had herself remodeled into a female model, and she had… a certain resemblance to me."

It was hard to point out specifically why she looked like X in the final design, but when Iris had made the sketch Dr. Cain had known what she was going for, though he'd insisted on making a few alterations. Everyone had still commented on the resemblance.

"Do you want to go as Zero?" Alia wondered.

X laughed. "Wouldn't that make it obvious?"

"Going was me would be really obvious, huh, since I'm going as you disguised as something." Axl was going to try to get people to think he was X for most of the party. "And you already grew your hair out." It seemed like a waste to cut it down so X could pose as Axl.

"It's a pity that Sleeping Beauty would be much too obvious." Alia sighed.

Well, "Why not?"

"I thought you didn't want anyone to be able to guess who you were?" Alia looked down at X, surprised.

"It's appropriate, and we don't have all day to pick something out, since you've still got Zero to do."

"I could try to costume Zero as the prince, but it would be hard, with his hair. It would be easier to do it the other way around. Oh, I know! What about Maleficent?"

Axl noticed that X got that regretful look at that. It was a specific type of thoughtful look that he got about the virus, and certain things about Zero, and dead people that he couldn't do anything about. X never answered when Axl asked him what he was thinking about when he had that look, so Axl didn't ask. He still wondered, though. Most people found the idea of X being a person with a lot of secrets really silly.

Axl thought most people were really silly themselves.

Alia didn't seem to notice. "Zero said that if I was going to insist on dressing him as a female model, it should at least be someone who wasn't embarrassing, that he might be able to stay in character as. The movie isn't a very long movie – have you seen it, Axl?"

"Nope!"

"Zero as Maleficent…" X seemed hesitant. "Maybe we should just cut my hair again and I could go as the prince, and Zero as Aurora." After all, Zero had also slept for a very long time. Not that these two knew that. Or Zero knew X knew.

"That wasn't the deal!" Axl reminded him, seeing Alia's frown of disappointment.

"All of the fabric I brought is color-change, since I didn't know what I'd be making in advance. It changes when given the correct electric pulse, so I could rig something up so that your dress kept changing from blue to pink…" Alia really liked the sleeping beauty idea.

X knew that Axl was in danger of getting spoiled, and forcing Zero to go as the evil witch responsible for Aurora sleeping that long was unnecessarily cruel, but he couldn't say _why _it was a bad idea, not without giving away Zero's secret.

Alia thought that X's hair was disappointing compared to Zero's. Alia had seen wigs before and X's hair felt like one. Zero's felt more alive, there was almost an internal warmth to it. X's was probably closer to natural, human hair, in the same way that X's body was designed with all of his life support systems under the layer of padding, so he could go without his armor for indefinite periods of time.

X could be disguised as a human very, very easily, and sometimes Alia wondered if that was why Dr. Light had put so much work into making his body realistic. In case he had to pass for human. In case the world hadn't been ready for him when he woke up. In case he had to hide.

That was Lifesaver's theory, and while it was easy to dismiss Lifesaver as too paranoid, the fact that Dr. Light had left X all those armor capsules, not to mention incorporated a buster into him in the first place when Megaman's initial design hadn't included any weapons indicated that yes, Dr. Light had been very, very concerned about the safety of his youngest creation. Not to mention the warning that if anyone tried to dissect X for the parts or to get a closer look at the technology, his body would destroy itself very thoroughly the instant he died.

"Maybe you could pretend to be Zero pretending to be this lady?" Axl suggested.

"That's going a little too far, Axl."

The movie just made it worse, and only Zero's poker face kept him from visibly wincing when Maleficent was referred to as the daughter of the devil, among many other… very much not funny at all in context moments. Although he did manage to make a joke about how X had that effect on rookies sometimes, during the scene with the animals, and asked if he should pretend to be Dr. Light pretending to be Maleficent, since Axl had told him that part of the plan and Dr. Light had put X to sleep to wait to be woken up.

X had elbowed him in the side for that, but still been relieved.

"It's _weird _to only wear human clothing. I don't know how you can possibly find this comfortable, X," Zero told him as Alia draped stuff around him while X worked on making Maleficent's staff. "I always feel naked without my armor systems hooked in. Speaking of which." He turned around to look at Aurora's gown on the stand. "You guys know how few reploids can take _all _of their armor off, right?"

Alia paused. "Oh, _cancer_."

X winced at her language, but that had been a stupid oversight on his part as well. "We'll need to make some fake armor – maybe leg armor, so it would go underneath the gown?"

"Something that looks like a female model spotter's light armor." Alia nodded. "That won't be a problem, I can get you authentic armor." From Douglas.

"Huh?" Axl asked, busy fiddling with his copy chip to try to get it to produce the details of his own costume.

"Reploids have this," X pointed to the 'skin' of his arm, "and it has give to it, like human skin, because it's foam padding that all of our systems are packed in. It functions as a shock absorber and serves several other functions as well. Modern reploids almost _have_ to be larger than I am, even though the square-cube law means that has severe penalties for combat performance, because modern parts are larger and less efficient. Designers try to compensate for some of that by installing some systems into the armor. This also carries severe penalties, because the purpose of armor is to _stop _damage from reaching vital systems. My armor doesn't contain anything that I absolutely _have _to have in order to function. It's mainly things like hazardous environment shielding, extra self-repair resources, my weapons systems, advanced balance and mobility and so on that I wouldn't need in a safe environment. Most hunters aren't so lucky."

"I'm larger, since I've got my weapons integrated on the subarmor level, same with mobility," Zero told Axl, "but it'd be very stupid to try to use form padding to contain a buster shot's energy instead of just compensating for the recoil."

"That's why the differences in body type and size can be so dramatic even leaving animal reploids out of it," Alia agreed. "There are a lot of systems that are vital out in the field that spotters don't need. Lifesaver, on the other hand, doesn't need combat systems but he does have a _lot _of specialized medical gear installed. Signas just has a very large processor."

"Right. Now that I think about it, I've _made _all of that before but I wasn't really thinking about it. I think I need to learn more about how reploids are put together." So Axl could make the most of his copy ability.

"Don't think that you need to configure yourself the way we do. There are a lot of limitations and vulnerabilities that we have that you don't, since you're entirely assembled from nanites. And vice-versa." If Axl's body was severely damaged, he could just reshape himself to fill in the wound until he ran out of energy and nanites. If his copy matrix was damaged, on the other hand, then he was in serious trouble, just like a reploid who took damage to their main processor.

Lumine had tried to infest Axl with some of his nanites as he died, to take him over the way he had the new generation reploids derived from him, but that had been a pointless act of desperation.

Axl and Lumine had been designed to be impossible to take over. It was that ability to keep and regain control of themselves that had made it such a disaster to copy Lumine. Eventually, Lumine's personality hadn't taken over those bodies from the new, edited personalities (in the way reploids had edited versions of X's programs and nanites), it had instead _regained _those bodies from the 'interlopers.'

Lumine hadn't taken over anything: those had been his bodies to begin with.

The difference between the two of them was that Axl was older than Lumine, and had plenty of experience of fighting the virus while Lumine had let himself be taken in by it.

In the end, Axl's reaction to Lumine's attack had been nothing but a temporarily coma while his body followed its purpose and proceeded to stomp, with extreme prejudice, whatever had tried to fuck with its personality and individuality. Searching his memory banks, Axl _had _gotten sick like that once before: the day of his first maverick hunt, when he'd gotten the injury he'd turned into a 'scar' to keep as a trophy. When his body had first learned how to kill the maverick virus.

That hadn't kept everyone from panicking at the prospect of losing an immune hunter, and watching his systems like a hawk for months, just in case.

"Your ability to repair your armor is greater than ours, but your armor isn't as solid." Since it was interlocking nanites instead of solid alloy.

Axl rolled his eyes. "Give me a break already, this is how many times you've given me this lecture? And Douglass, and Alia, and Signas, and Palette, and Zero, too!"

"Start acting like a responsible adult who knows their limits, and we'll stop fussing over you, kid," said Zero.

"Moof…" Alia took the scissors out of her mouth. "Move your arm, I need to see how this falls."

X looked at the clock. "Alia, where did you put the pins?"

"Over there, in that box."

"The hairpins?"

Alia paused. "Where _did _I put the hairpins?"

"I don't know how long it will take me to put all this up under my helmet, and I've got a meeting in twenty minutes."


	3. Best Prank Ever

_Oh, yes: I don't own the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty, either. Disney does. If you haven't seen it, do so: beautiful animation and much awesome._

_Also, this omake-thing, as well as being crack, is also very much X/Zero, more so than the original oneshot._

* * *

"This is déjà vu, somehow." That was Zero's reaction to the small crow mechanaloid toy Alia had found him to use as a prop.

"I think your costume's shaping up nicely. What do you think, Alia?"

Alia nodded. "I think you've both turned out fairly well, although I wish I'd had more notice." She and Axl had only been able to set this up and rope X in a week before the party. The costumes were Alia's birthday gift to X, and Zero's participation in this was his, or one of his.

"I hope no one figures it out! They're all going to flip at midnight, it'll be awesome!" Axl laughed like the child he was, and X regretted that newbuilt reploids didn't have the luxury of being that way.

"If Dr. Cain was still alive, he'd be laughing so hard." X had to smile at the thought, looking in the mirror. He had to modulate his voicebox so giggles came out instead of chortles when he finally collapsed, laughing at how he looked in the dress, with that hair.

"No one would ever believe X would mess with people like this. And everyone'll know this isn't Unit Zero's kind of prank. You're taking all the heat for this, kid," Zero told Axl, before trying to alter his own voice. "The years roll by, but a hundred years to a steadfast heart, are but a day," he quoted. "Dr. Cain should have been the prince."

"He used to make sleeping beauty jokes sometimes, actually." Just sometimes. Other times, the tales of the king sleeping under the mountain, waking when the people were in need.

Dr. Cain had always been joking, but other people really looked at X and seen those things. He was a symbol of hope, even now. Of purity and incorruptibility, thanks to his immunity.

"Or maybe we should leave, change, and slip back in before midnight," he found himself saying. "It would be nice to have no one know who we were, don't you think?"

Although it was sadly easy for X to go incognito. He didn't need to even pass for human to go unrecognized. All he had to do was wear armor that wasn't blue, and only people who knew him well would give him a second glance.

"I should go as the prince," Axl suggested, since X seemed melancholy.

"No, you'll give yourself away." Zero clapped him on the shoulder. "It's a party, you should play around. And if you're in a group of three, it'll be really obvious."

"I guess, but… why aren't you having fun?"

Zero stilled. "What do you mean? This is weird, but it's fun. That's why I have my unit pull stuff, to teach hunters to expect the unexpected. This is out there, but that's what makes it great." He flourished the staff, trying to get into the role.

"No, you're acting really serious about it. Is it because of Dr. Cain? You've got the dead people look, both of you."

"Dead people look?" X was better at acting innocent than Zero was.

"Like this is reminding you guys of something bad, something that's secret. If you didn't want to do sleeping beauty, you should just have said so. It's kind of late to redo the costumes now." Axl frowned. "Is it my fault?" People sometimes got weird ideas about what he wanted, or didn't object to things when he'd counted on them speaking up if they minded something, and then he felt bad about railroading them into stuff they didn't want to do. X said that he had to keep in mind that other people were vulnerable to something called 'peer pressure,' that he wasn't, because of how he was immune, and so they would get different ideas or not stick up for themselves if Axl didn't watch it.

"No, Axl, not at all," X reassured him.

Zero couldn't bring up that he didn't like the comparison to someone who had an army of subhuman monsters and was trying to kill X, or… the idea of putting a spell on him was even worse, even more of a metaphor. "You'll understand when you're older. The longer you live, the more… baggage you pick up."

"And this is a party, it's about forgetting all of that. It's good to replace bad memories with good ones," X chimed in.

"You guys are _weird,"_ Axl said again, because he kept getting more and more context with which to recognize how weird they were. "It's really important, isn't it, and you want to tell me?" Was that right?

"That's not it at all." Inwardly, X cursed himself for trying to get Axl to use his decryption software on body language and so on. He'd _meant _for him to use it to get a clue when people were trying to send him nonverbal signals (to, for example, knock it off), not to use it to try to figure out what was going on with X and Zero. Of course, he should have realized which one Axl would assign a higher priority level to.

"You don't want to tell me?" Whoever was responsible for teaching Axl about the kicked puppy eyes was going to get dragged out and shot if Zero had anything to do with it.

"I'd like you to be told," said X, picking his words with care.

Which implied that it wasn't X's secret, Zero realized. And he knew when both he and X were thinking the same thing. Except X _couldn't _be thinking what Zero was thinking, because X didn't know. He'd have done something if he knew, like… like what?

Try to kill him? Not X.

Put him into containment in medical? Torture and interrogate him? No, no.

Visit him in secret to let him know that X knew and didn't care? Not when there were security cameras on base. Not when it was something this important. No, he'd wait for Zero to come forward, when Zero was okay with it. He'd trust Zero's judgment and believe that there was a reason he hadn't turned himself in before. While taking time to do his own research.

Out of MHHQ, where there wasn't a risk of revealing Zero's secrets.

Zero looked at X, who was studiously not looking at Zero, and realized that he _knew_.

Zero didn't have any opinion of religion. It had nothing to do with his life, aside from the fact General had been some sort of religion, from the stuff in his office, and if there was a hell, Zero was _so _going there the instant he stayed dead. Unless they were kicking him out and that was why he kept coming back. Murdering several billion in a genocidal rampage and then unleashing the virus might be a little too evil.

And yet there was only one response to this. "_Dammit_."

He could yell at X for not telling him, except he already knew how that conversation would go, and it would accomplish nothing except him getting dragged down to secure containment in medical, with Alia here.

"Axl, this falls under those words." X finally said, almost smiling at Zero's response. Half-apologetic, half fond, and an extra little bit of, 'you're only figuring it out now?' in there.

"Grown-up stuff?" Axl pouted. "But you guys have got to tell me eventually, ok?"

"Sure," Zero said, to get him to shut up and leave the subject alone. Then he realized that he actually meant it. "Someday."

Just… not now.

"You two aren't dating and keeping it secret from everybody, are you? Because there's a lot of money riding on that." Axl _knew _it wasn't something like that, they knew, but while the kid might have a blind spot the size of Eurasia and the mental stability of a gyroscope, those were side effects of keeping his priorities straight (no matter what tried to mess with them, the virus, Lumine, or society), and they were his friends, so they were a priority. He wasn't going to get them in trouble.

Unless he thought it was something like what had happened to Red Alert. Then he'd do what had to be done.

Just as he had to his first foster family.

"Axl!" Alia yelped.

"We already knew," Zero said, rolling his eyes. "What? The betting pool has been going on for how many years now? We'd have to be blind not to have noticed."

"And you've just let people waste their money instead of clarifying things?"

"I view it as a fine for sticking their noses into my personal life," Zero informed Alia.

For X, "It's one of those things that I pretend I don't know about." Because it would embarrass the children.

Zero heard, 'it's one of those things that I pretend I don't know about, like Zero being the source of the maverick virus and Dr. Wily's creation and meant to kill me and having dreams about cutting me open and doing unspeakable things.'

"I need a drink," said Zero, putting his face in his hands and trying to tell himself he was being paranoid.

* * *

The stack of presents was blue.

Oh, some of the wrapping paper was white with blue polka dots, or some kind of plaid with blue and green, but aside from such variations on a theme, it was blue, blue and more blue. Aside from books and antiques, X knew the contents would be the same.

X felt for Aurora in that final scene, where well-meaning people were arguing over her dress and changing it without her permission. Only, in his case, instead of voices saying 'Blue,' 'Pink,' ad nauseum, it was all blueblueblue all the time.

It was probably a good thing the capsule had given him a patient nature, or else he would be really sick of that color after all these years.

X told himself that yes, he definitely was changing the colors of his armor up a little. If he was thinking such ungrateful thoughts while looking at a stack of gifts, then he really needed a break from the color.

Axl had entered earlier and was already hanging with Unit Zero.

Axl's costume changed throughout the night, as per the plan, but he managed to get people to think that X was around the party _somewhere_ dressed as a bluebird.

X would have sworn that Axl had picked that to annoy him if he hadn't known that Axl had picked it to make fun of people other than him when they found out.

Zero was holding court and getting a lot of compliments on the costume. X's was less dramatic so there weren't as many comments, unless people guessed 'she' was the princess from that movie. Around five pm the alcohol (and reploid equivalents) started to be served (the party had started at noon, for the people in different time zones or who wanted to be gone before things started getting crazy). Those who left early were disappointed they didn't get to meet X, but guessing who everyone was: that was part of the point of a costume party, and that made a receiving line (standing there for hours shaking hands) impossible.

Thank goodness. That itself was well worth the dress.

Everyone guessed who Zero was after his/her fifth drink, but people's eyes slid over X, assuming that he was some shy rookie spotter from Unit Zero who had gone along with this for a pretty outfit and a chance to be near Zero. The way Zero started hanging over X didn't help matters.

X found it easy to play the bubbly, giggly blonde, since the way no one had even the slightest clue was frankly hilarious. Also, Zero was playing with X's hair, when he wasn't flourishing his cape and staff dramatically, and getting his movie lines mixed up. For example: "I have you now, my pretty!" and "Poor unfortunate souls," which made X double over with laughter, dying to know who had made Zero watch _The Little Mermaid_, since it hadn't been him, and how they'd managed it.

Probably either Iris or his unit. Axl wasn't the only one who'd gotten a forfeit from Zero for pulling off something significant in terms of training, although the forfeit had been bigger since there was more incentive to get Axl trained up to SA rank _a decade ago_. An SA-ranked _non-immune_ hunter was actually a liability, since Sigma would be after them damn quick.

Except Sigma was gone. The virus was a serpent without a head. The virus was still out there, people like Lumine and Dynamo still existed, but progress had been made, even if they had Lumine to thank for it.

Whatever Lumine had done to permanently destroy Sigma? They weren't even letting the _whisper _of the possibility that Axl might be able to figure out how to attack the virus the same way reach anyone. Not even Axl. It would put too much on his shoulders.

It was hard for X to feel guilty about letting Zero think the alcohol substitute would do anything for him when he took to it so happily. Zero really needed an excuse to go a little wild and let things out.

For one thing, while most of the time he had a huge bubble of personal space (perhaps he was afraid of infecting people?), when 'drunk' he was very physically affectionate.

Honestly, X wondered how common it was for reploids to have a thing for hair. Sure, Zero was a reploid magnet, but that was _Zero_. Dr. Wily seemed to have gone all-out on making him aesthetically pleasing as well as deadly. X had been given a neutral physical appearance: not unattractive, but something he could customize to suit himself. Zero, on the other hand, was often described as resembling a Greek god.

Zero kept putting his hands into X's hair and rubbing his head, which felt quite nice.

It was nice to be a spectator instead of the center of attention. Well, he was attracting a few glances, but they were people who saw him as 'the spotter with the expensive wig,' or 'that lucky bitch that Zero's paying attention to,' not X.

He _had _to do this more often.

Especially because it had become clear that a lot of people hadn't had any idea what costumes were, or who they might want to dress up as. Even X's unit practically swarmed him the week before the party, wanting ideas and advice. The average hunter was currently a year and a half old, and testing, training…

War left very little time for the things that made life worth living.

That was part of why the birthdays of the senior staff were such a big deal. For humans, X's age wasn't a big deal (provided you didn't count the century of hibernation), but the newbuilts found it _amazing_. Just like this party, a sort of dream amidst… everything.

Most of the costumes were from children's movies or horror movies. X didn't like the irony of the Peter Pan costumes, but there were vampires, Frankenstein's monsters, Borg, a rather good Mad Hatter…

"Having fun, dearie?" Zero crooned, voice still disguised.

"Mm-hum!" 'She' nodded.

"You! Surrender that couch!" Zero ordered a couple low-ranked hunters from Unit Eight, and pulled X up and over to lie down with 'her' head on Zero's lap. "It makes perfect sense to me," Zero said, back to his normal voice. "Pretty young lady spending the rest of eternity in a bed behind a wall of thorns that only Maleficent could get to, keeping the competition out of the way… what do you think?"

"She would have missed her family, when she woke up, wouldn't she? And felt sorry for the prince, being captive so long."

Zero rubbed X's head in sort of an apology. "Do you think that someday your prince will come?"

X blinked up at him. "Don't I already have a knight in shining armor?"

That got him pulled up for another kiss, and if X was in a normal frame of mind, he wouldn't have felt a bit of annoyance that Zero was so much better at this than he was. Honestly, he was being so immature today. First being miffed at the _wrapping paper_, of all things, then acting like an empty-headed giggly rookie, although that _was _part of the act, and now this. He had to keep in mind that no, he didn't have the excuse of even thinking that he was drunk.

He wished he did, the way Zero did. It would be nice to be able to let go.

Well, just like Zero was only willing to let go when X was there in case anything happened, then when could he let go if not now? Zero was here, he was incognito, and it was his birthday.

So when Zero was done, X leaned up to kiss him.

This somehow resulted in X being pinned down to the couch and kissed very thoroughly, with a hand trailing up his leg under the dress, not that he was complaining. To tell Zero that this was his first time or not to tell him?

Well, they probably wouldn't get anywhere near _that _far, not in public. He couldn't even feel the hand, since that was where the fake armor was and it wasn't actually hooked up to his systems.

He didn't want to take advantage of some newbuilt who idolized him, much less be taken advantage of by some social climber, but this was Zero and thus the question was, why not?

Well besides… the reasons that he shouldn't do _anything _with Zero, but he was well-practiced at ignoring those.

"Should we…?" There was hesitance in Zero's voice, and his voice was low enough that X only heard it because the sound was being conducted from Zero's lips to his ear.

X used the same trick. "Somewhere else?"

"I want to talk to you about… not here."

Well, figuring out that X knew must have been a sobering realization, but Zero was thinking, and for some reason X found that sad. He hadn't meant for Zero to find out, not like that. "Sure. I don't mind."

"My quarters?"

"Why not?" Going there instead of X's would keep people from seeing them en route and guessing who X was from that.

* * *

_Reggae is a robot crow that Wily has in the Megamix manga. Apparently his robots find it very annoying._

_Zero has heard people say the 'I need a drink' line (and they heard it said on old TV shows and movies and such watched off-duty more than by actual people) and that's really the source of the idea that this would make things better/why he said it. Diffusion of memes in an era without the internet and with the reploid-human cultural divide is interesting to think about, although memes will find a way._

_Given that one of the definitions of meme is mind-virus (using 'virus' as 'primitive quasi-life-form that needs hosts to reproduce and spread') that's kind of an interesting thought._

_Also, part of the point of this fic (as well as my Sleeping Beauty running joke) was for X to get a chance to be a bit of a kid. We all know the story: lost his family before waking up, had to be the poster boy for reploids so the world would accept them, then the war started. Axl is being a bad influence on him, or a good influence, really, since it's reminding him of what it's like to play around and that it's not all that bad to be a little selfish._

_For him, the entire Aurora thing is mocking how people see him and, to a degree, how he expects himself to be. Symbol of hope, dawn of a new age, etc. etc. Friend to All Living Things (due to people not really getting what pacifism is and why X is not a pacifist) etc._

_Seriously: X is not a pacifist. Knowing that war is hell is called not being an idiot, not pacifism. Being anti-war and being a pacifist are not the same thing: don't get me started on anti-war movements appropriating a title that they have no right to and undermining the efforts of real pacifists in the process. They keep using that word: I don't think it means what they think it means. X shoots people dead. Therefore, X is not a pacifist._


	4. Fluffflufffluff

_Flufffluffluff._

* * *

You knew."

"Yes." This was part of why X hadn't wanted to let Zero know that he knew. Zero was perfectly capable of tactics, strategy, trickery and so on… until the instant it became personal, and at that point he shut down and almost started spazzing. The second half of the fourth war he'd been almost an automaton, and that wasn't going into that moment of stunning _idiocy_ in the fifth.

At least they were in Zero's quarters with the door closed, but there _were _cameras here. They were only looked at by a living person in case of an emergency and so on, but a conversation like this? X made a very firm mental note to avoid anything like a keyword that someone might search for.

Although, X was in Zero's quarters rarely enough that it would be easy to search the records for that. Generally, gatherings were something X set up and dragged Zero into attending, and therefore they were held in his quarters.

So X sat on Zero's bed and patted it for Zero to sit down next to him. Talking the way they had in that crowd was a much, much better idea than out loud. "I didn't want to bring it up, for several reasons."

Instead of sitting next to him, Zero went down to one knee, putting his head in X's lap. X rested a hand on his head, feeling the hair elaborately twisted up into the shapes of horns and admiring the fine coordination needed to do something that intricate. Zero had insisted on doing it himself since Alia's fingers weren't clumsy, by modern reploid standards, but Zero got a little paranoid about his hair sometimes. "I'd die for you," Zero said, and the raw honesty there showed why Zero had been drinking so heavily. He'd needed that to be able to handle this, that artificial courage.

"Yes." X managed to smile. "I've noticed. I really wish you'd knock it off, by the way." That made Zero chuckle. "It was terrible what happened with your first crush…"

"First _crush?_" Iris wasn't a crush.

X rolled his eyes. "And then Iris." X wasn't going to be the one to bring up Sigma. Had Zero even noticed that he'd worshipped the ground General Sigma walked on, before his betrayal? Or had he just put it down to gratitude, for that heroic rescue and the way Sigma had taken him in instead of blaming him for the deaths. "Of course I know that you care a lot about me. Everyone does, the only question has been how. I just haven't confronted you about it because I was waiting for you to be ready to deal with it."

And they both knew that wasn't what this conversation was about, but even though X was well known to be too trusting, loose lips wiped out units. Spend years in an environment where almost every single person you talked to could, at any moment, become an enemy agent, and you learned to be very careful with what you said to who where who else could overhear.

"I haven't wanted to risk hurting you. When I was found, I…" Zero shook his head.

"I'm more durable than Iris, Zero." Which was a sad comment on so many things. "And I know you wouldn't hurt me." X paused. "Aside from training sessions." And that… temporary insanity in the fifth war.

When Zero didn't respond, X wondered, "Do you know what it means to offer someone your left hand to shake?"

Zero shook his head again.

"Offering your right hand meant, 'I'm not carrying a weapon to attack you with,' but humans of that era carried their shields in their left hands. So offering that hand meant, 'I'm not carrying a shield to defend myself with.' It means 'I trust you.'"

"You're too trusting."

"Would you rather have me any other way?"

Zero's answer was to pick up and kiss X's left hand, which frankly amazed him. When had Zero learned how to be romantic? He'd been adorably awkward with Iris. Unless it was pure sincerity. "You can't put yourself at risk. Any more than you have to." Zero had to admit that last part, even though it grated on him. If Zero'd had his way, X would have stayed retired after the Sixth war, or gone back to Medical, the way he'd been medical staff when he first joined the hunters.

"I'll try not to die, Zero," X assured him. Then, he realized what to say. "For you, I'll try not to die."

Zero kissed his hand again, pulling his fingers apart and bending them, examining them. There were false fingernails, and the support struts did a good job imitating bones. Dr. Light had been careful, when it came to X's safety. He'd had a long time to work on X, or rather have the nanites in the capsule work on the fine details, since he hadn't been able to activate him right away. Zero didn't have anywhere near X's amount of verisimilitude. Zero had been meant to fight, not survive.

X let him, touching Zero's hair. There was still a lot of it left unbound, and it didn't feel anything like silk. Silk was an insulator, cool and smooth to the touch. Zero's hair was warm, and felt almost like holding a tail, holding something living that could decide to move.

"There are two immune people now," Zero said finally. "And Sigma's gone."

Two, not three? Zero not counting himself was one big Freudian slip.

Unless it was entirely deliberate. "We still don't know about Axl," X told him, sadly. "Whoever built him appears to have used the method Dr. Light used on Protoman and I, from the surviving literature. Program a basic framework, build a starting shell and create a stable environment for it, and allow the constructed intelligence to do its own fine-turning and fix its own problems. Axl was turned loose to see if he would get infected or not, without any idea what he was or what he had to do to keep running. He's still doing the beta testing for his species, right now, and what if he goes into one of those immune analysis comas, or some other bug catches up with him, while someone is shooting at him? He may wear that scar as a trophy, but… For all Alia, Lifesaver, or any of us knows, he could drop dead tomorrow. Unlike Lumine, he wasn't _meant _to survive, he was built with the assumption that he would be tested to destruction. If his systems weren't doing their own upgrades and replacing their own materials by copying better models and continuing to constantly analyze their own structure to check for infection, he'd be burning out by now."

That was why X kept trying to figure out how to get Axl to copy him and Zero, every time he had a spare moment to look into that. X and Zero had vastly superior systems, and it could only help Axl to incorporate parts of their technology into his structure.

"No one knew what he _was_ when he joined the hunters, let alone how to repair him. If anything goes wrong with his self-repair systems? His copy matrix is everything from his self-repair system to his skeleton. If anything, anything at all, _significant_ goes wrong with Axl, anything that he can't pull out of on his own with access to e-tanks and raw materials to work with, then there won't be anything we can do."

That had been the case with the mass-produced duplicates of Lumine as well. It had been cruel to mass-produce newbuilts that no one could fix if anything went wrong, but even X had thought it had been less cruel than mass-producing newbuilts with no defense against the virus. Then it turned out that they'd had the worst of both worlds. There was nothing to save them from industrial accidents… or Lumine.

"So I can't retire just yet?" Zero sighed. "I've been trying to get him trained up."

"As your replacement. Yes, I noticed. You were very adamant about having him as your second-in-command instead of giving him a unit." Signas wanted Axl fast-tracked to command training, because if Signas was taken out it was the immune hunters who would have to take over until another reploid with a high resistance to the virus was built to take his place. The Maverick Hunters definitely couldn't have a list of candidates for Signas' replacement: they'd be infected practically the day the list was created.

Lives would be lost with a rookie in charge of a unit, but more would be lost in the long run if Axl didn't learn how to command by the time the next war broke out. Often, it was not just tactical decisions but _strategic_ that the hunter in the field had to make.

"You know me so well… I don't know if I want to say I love you. That's such a… fuzzy thing, for humans too. You're X." To Zero, that was a very precise thing, a very important thing, not something that should be described with a word that could mean anything and too often was a lie.

He'd loved Iris, and yet he'd killed her. X had talked to Zero not long after that and asked Zero to kill him if he ever became maverick. Zero had been able to kill Iris, but he'd realized then that he'd _never _be able to kill X, and the contrast had just made him feel like even more of a traitor to her.

"Ze…" X tilted his head forward, hair falling around them. "…One second?"

"Sure?" Zero watched as X got up, found a wire tie to put his hair back with, and began to remove the spotter armor from his legs.

"I'm definitely seeing why you wear a ponytail. It gets _everywhere _when you have it loose."

Zero didn't mention that his did what he wanted it to, regardless. Like staying in one neat bundle instead of flying all over the place in the wind.

"And it's _odd _to be wearing armor that isn't hooked up to my systems."

"You wear clothing all the time, and it isn't hooked up to anything."

"Yes, but it's not anywhere near as thick or heavy. I can feel things through it. It's just a little extra padding, not rigid dead weight." X didn't kick it off the way Zero might have, both because that made a mess and because there were breakables in here.

"…You say rigid dead weight like armor isn't like that normally."

X paused. "Well, armor _is _supposed to dampen the sensory signals we take in. It wouldn't be good if we felt pain when our armor was singed." Distracting. "But it's supposed to take in data and give it to us, in a limited fashion." To hook up to their systems, not with wires since that invited electrical attacks and power surges, but nanites conveying information and instructions. "Armor is supposed to be a part of a reploid's body."

Zero laughed, leaning back against the bed. "Another way I'm weird, huh? Probably because I'm not working the way I'm supposed to. Wearing this is weird for me because there _isn't _much of a barrier between…" He shut his mouth.

"You and the world? You and me?" X sat back down and pulled Zero's head onto his lap after disconnecting the color-change device. The fabric of his costume returned to its default color, a sort of shimmery white.

"Blond hair in a ponytail… you look like me."

"I think that was part of Alia's idea, really. You know how much she likes your looks. If she had to make you look like someone else, then she was going to make someone look like you."

Zero chuckled. "Devious. It's weird, isn't it? Alia and Signas have been around such a long time, and now there's Axl. After so long, it's weird to have friends who aren't you." Friends who lasted more than one or two wars, who lasted enough not just for Zero to learn their tricks but to learn tricks of their own in the first place.

"The virus is weakening. Sigma's attempts to replace it may have been more desperate than we realized at the time. Now he's dead, and while Lumine spread the virus, he was making a copy of it in his own systems, it wasn't reproducing naturally. He may have weakened it further."

"What do you think, of trying to build more reploids with resistant systems?"

"If we build too many, we'll start breeding a stronger virus again." By giving it challenges. "But there isn't an intelligent opponent behind the virus' choices anymore, just its own programming. We've made good guesses at its target selection algorithms, among other things. Right now, the barriers to overcoming the virus aren't the virus itself, but the limits of current technology and the fact that some people, reploid and human alike, have started to believe the virus' propaganda about humans and reploids being enemies, thanks to Lumine."

"And Repliforce," Zero added glumly. "We were having a romantic… thing, and then we ended up talking shop."

"When don't we end up talking shop?" X found a couple of hairs that had managed to escape Zero's coiled horn arrangement. "We can't even watch a movie without thinking of old times and having to try to avoid scarring Axl for life. Again." Zero would have wondered what X was talking about if he hadn't quickly figured out that X was saying that for any potential listeners.

"There's so much stuff that I don't even try to explain anymore. It only makes sense in context, and it's like they get… more and more ignorant every year."

"We're getting older, so they seem younger by comparison. Part of it may be that… In the beginning, reploids were created with copies of my nanites. Over the years, people have been editing the design more and more, creating different batches with different modifications in case diversity helped stop the virus," which it had, sort of, by breeding it to be less targeted, forcing it to generalize and become less deadly in the process, "so they're not starting from the same… frame of reference, which they can then choose to ignore or alter, the way the first generation was. There's a lot more initial diversity of mind, which is wonderful, but it makes it harder for them to learn to understand each other and they have so little time."

"They're still managing to hook up."

"Yes. By getting drunk at parties, or having crushes and ignoring the faults of their partners instead of loving them for them. It makes them happy, but that's not going to give them anything lasting." X sighed, lowering his head. Whether or not it would be a lasting relationship didn't really matter for most hunters. They wouldn't last that long anyway.

"Don't knock getting drunk at parties. 'Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.' We wouldn't be here right now without Axl's forfeit." Zero laughed. "Surprised me when he picked something besides the dress. It's not like there aren't enough altered images of me out there already." He'd thought Axl would consider it a coup while Zero wouldn't really care: best of both worlds, to give the kid a sense of accomplishment without Zero having to actually embarrass himself.

"Apparently your unit thought you seriously needed it. I agreed, when he asked me about the medical aspect."

"I don't feel like I'm going to flip out and start killing people." That was a relief. Zero somehow managed to shift around so he was looking up at X: he really was incredibly agile.

"That's always a good thing."

"What would you do, if…" Zero shrugged. "If Axl could break down someday, what about me?" 'Break down' – go back to the Irregular he'd been when he was found? That was the least of Zero's dangers. As an Irregular, he hadn't been sentient, and an opponent who couldn't think wasn't much danger. No, a _maverick _Zero was the real danger.

"Didn't Eurasia answer that? I'd fight you, Zero. If I had to. That was half of why you fought me then, wasn't it?" When X had said that he would fight Zero to take him back to base and make sure. The other reason had been so that X would go back, where it was safe.

Well, with a lot more Zero-logic involved.

"…I guess." Zero didn't like to think about that time too closely. He hadn't _quite _been himself then.

Even if he had been close enough, in the end.

But, anyway, "It's your birthday, isn't it? What do you want?"

X wondered about asking for world peace as a joke, but that was one of those things that just wouldn't be funny. "Ran out of gift ideas after all these years, did you?"

Actually, Zero hadgotten X the newest-model (according to Alia, since he was _not _going to have anything to do with Lifesaver willingly and the feeling was mutual) multi-setting field emergency surgical tool. X would have already bought one for himself, of course, but Zero was well aware after all these years that they broke. Often.

"Today has been fun. And it's nice to get this, well, somewhat cleared up." X was trying to think of a way to say that, 'regardless of the virus, we're still friends,' that would sound like 'regardless of whether or not we end up lovers, we'll always be friends,' which was also true, when Zero reached up, pulled X's head down by his ponytail and kissed him again.

Which was nice, but an incredibly awkward position. "Come up on the bed?" X tugged at him.

Zero raised an eyebrow. "You aren't wasting any time."

"How long have you loved me?"

Zero had to wonder, especially since he'd said that he didn't want to use that word, until he realized the incredibly obvious and incredibly _frustrating _answer. "Always."

"Then I think enough time's been wasted." X put some muscle, or motor power, behind the next pull, enough to easily drag Zero up onto the bed with him.

Finding himself put on his side next to X, Zero ran his hand up X's side, sort of liking the way the fabric slid against X's 'skin.' Touching armor had always seemed impersonal to Zero, who had almost no feeling in his. "I suppose there's something to be said for human clothing." He could feel the quiet purr of X's system noise through it. "It's… nice, I guess."

"This is nice. Being here like this." It would be nicer if the lights were off, X thought. Then there would just be the lights of their eyes, and Zero's clock and other various electronics casting soft shadows everywhere, forcing them to reach out to examine each other, confirm that they were real, with touch instead of sight.

Zero seemed to already be doing that, though, with a particular focus on X's waist, hips, shoulders, the places where clumsily-made joints often made a reploid's artificial nature obvious. Trying to build Sigma and the reploids that followed him had made X thoroughly aware of just how much _work _Dr. Light had put into him. It was humbling and touching at the same time. His father had _cared _about X, and it showed in the care he had taken with every aspect of his construction.

Feeling Zero's hands on him and thinking about that, suddenly X was struck by the need to make sure that Zero was _alright_. To touch him, not with the silent, peaceful contemplation Zero caressed X with, but with a terrible urgency, a need to make sure that Zero's power, meant for destruction, wasn't destroying him as he lay here with X.

It was an entirely irrational urge, but he didn't want to lose Zero.

Zero probably had the right idea. They should take this slow, and he should let Zero lead. Zero was the one who knew what he was doing, after all.

And yet X's hands cupped Zero's face, X's mouth kissed him desperately, and X's body pressed against him.

They had more than three hours until midnight.

It didn't seem like it would be enough. It didn't seem like any amount of time with Zero would ever be enough.

Zero was surprised by X's forcefulness, and almost shocked by how far X wanted to go, but how could he possibly refuse?


	5. Suddenly, Plot

_And, suddenly, plot!_

* * *

They made it back to the party in time, everyone was appropriately stunned when X teleported his own armor on at the midnight unmasking, and then the real party started. X was tied down unwrapping presents and greeting people: Zero and Axl stayed by his side for awhile, but Axl was in the following her around like a puppy stage of his relationship with Alia and Zero was nudged away by others so he didn't take up _all _of X's time and attention. X made his way out a little before 6am, and at that point he needed to hit the recharge capsule to be on time tomorrow. Very few people other than those who had been on watch would be, but that actually made it a good opportunity to get caught up with the work he'd been too busy to do in the weeks leading up to his birthday.

Signas had assumed, when he was new, that X would want the day after his birthday off in order to recover. X had disabused him of that notion. X didn't drink, and the fact that people assumed X would take that day off meant people didn't contact him as much on that day and he could make up for the fact that they would have been contacting him constantly with good wishes and so on in the days leading up to his birthday.

Zero also worked the days after parties because he didn't drink and someone had to work those shifts. X wasn't surprised that Zero didn't wander in during the workday: for Zero, work was work, and he was going to need some time to think about what had happened. If he took too long, X would have to go drag him out of whatever slump he'd managed to think himself into, but Zero was a person who needed his space.

"Commander Signas."

Signas looked up from his console to see Zero nod formally. The question that immediately came to mind was how long ago had the latest maverick war started. Zero was unmistakably on a wartime footing. Unlike X, Zero didn't have the option of ordering his body to stop displaying his moods, and while Zero was more of a private person than X, Signas had known him for enough years to recognize Zero's 'I'm tired of this but I'm going to do my duty anyway' expression. It showed in the way he was attempting to not show anything, in the tension around the shoulders, and especially his eyes.

Then. Signas remembered how Zero had looked after Iris, and after his return from the dead during the Sixth War. The next question he decided not to ask was who had died.

Or who was going to have to die.

"Come in, Zero," he nodded, not standing on formality for the moment even though Zero had tried to retreat behind it.

"I have something to report. It's not something that should be spread around. It has medical ramifications, but I'd prefer X not be present. Or informed of the meeting."

Signas raised an eyebrow. "Our Chief Medical Officer and you have had some differences in the past. Would you prefer Alia be present instead?"

Zero shook his head. "You're probably going to want both of them there for this."

"If it's that serious…" Then there were security reasons to want X to be present instead of Lifesaver: X was immune, Lifesaver wasn't. What would Zero not want X to know? "If you're experiencing medical complications, since my father's death, X is the one who knows the most about your systems. I'll hear you out, but if your life is at stake, I'm going to have to order you to share the information with him."

"I'm not dying, if that's what you're thinking. It's just…" Zero seemed to steel himself for something "You should sweep for bugs before I tell you."

"Three hours from now, in the secure medical ward?"

"That would be ideal." Zero seemed caught between a wry smile and a sigh: he _hated _the medical wing. "I'll see you then." He nodded again, and Signas returned the gesture, indicating that Zero could go.

On the way out the door, Zero hesitated. "It's rather shocking information, and I don't know if Axl can keep a secret like that, but… just in case, it might be a good idea to have him present."

* * *

"Hey, Zero? What's this all about?" Axl was the one tactless enough to just ask.

"It's a long story, so I'd appreciate it if no one pushed the panic button until I'm done." Zero laid his beam sabre down on the examination table with a click, and that was when Signas knew what this had to be about.

Zero walked over to the wall to lean against it, looking up at the ceiling. "All of you except Axl know more about the details of the shape I was found in than I do." The medical and technical details, the minutae of the detective work that the Irregular Hunters had done, trying to track down his builder to press charges. "I didn't know anything more than what Dr. Cain, X and Sigma told me, not until… After the third war, I started having dreams, of being in a capsule and sometimes there was a human with strange hair there. Then, when I fought Sigma at the end of the fourth war, we both had this… vision of when I fought him. The first time, when he was an Irregular Hunter and I was… not an Irregular. Or maybe I was, I probably wasn't supposed to wake up insane." Zero shook his head, since that was dodging the subject.

"I almost killed him, then I stopped and started… fighting with myself to spare his life. The crystal on my forehead," Zero touched it, "was glowing. He guessed that it was controlling me, and tried to smash it. He could, but that was when it happened. Afterwards, I didn't believe what I'd seen – No, I did. I just didn't want it to matter." He turned his face to the side, not looking at anything in particular, just away from them. "Then the fifth war made it obvious that I was the source of the virus. You were right, Lifesaver."

"Of course I was." It had been painfully obvious.

"We know, Zero. We've known since then," said Alia, trying to sound calming.

"Wait, what? Zero's the source of the maverick virus?" They might have known, but Axl hadn't. "That means I was trying to copy… Oh man, thank goodness I couldn't do it!" He smacked his head against his hand. "You could have told me earlier! I might have ended up… Nah, no way I'd end up like that loser." Lumine and his speech of stupid.

"You all… knew?"

"You were trying to hide it?" He'd actually been trying to deceive them? Signas frowned.

"Zero, really. Hiding while you repaired yourself until the sixth war? You thought we believed that? _You_, repairing yourself? X, maybe, but Layer still has to walk you through basic instrumentation." With some help from Alia. Everyone knew that Zero was as close as a reploid could get to a technophobe.

"…I couldn't think of anything better to say. You didn't bring it up, and so…" They'd welcomed him back with happiness instead of the terrible suspicion there had been all through the fifth war. It had been forgotten, and he'd tried to forget it. But if it hadn't been forgotten, then that meant… "Well, no wonder you didn't suspect me anymore, if you _knew_." Zero seemed to shrink in on himself, and he raised a hand to hide his eyes as his voice grew unsteady. "You knew, and you didn't… Why?" Why had they let him walk around loose? Why didn't they hate him?

They all realized it at the same time, but Axl was the one who said it. "Zero, are you… are you crying?"

"You were willing to let us analyze your systems, on your return. You have cooperated to the best of your ability, I'm sure. There was no reason to remove one of our best unit commanders. You have an impeccable record of service as an Irregular and Maverick Hunter. If anyone has earned the world's trust, has earned our trust, you have." Signas took refuge in stating facts, not having any idea how to deal with _Zero _breaking down like this.

The words just made his shoulders shake with suppressed emotion, made more silent tears fall.

"X trusts you, and so do we." Signas had been built personally by Dr. Cain, who had encouraged him to see X as something of an uncle, and to lean on him if command grew too difficult. Iris had been Signas' sister, and Zero would have been his brother-in-law if it weren't for Repliforce's foolishness.

Alia nodded. "It's obvious that you care about him, that you're capable of caring. Even for a creation of Dr. Light. You're more than what you were built to be."

"Is that why you didn't want X to be here? You thought he'd hate you for this?" Surely not.

"Yeah!" Axl agreed with Signas. "And Signas, and Alia… Come on, that's just stupid."

Zero shook his head, trying to regain control. "X knows. I realized that he did, and he… I thought he'd be the one to defend me, to try and stop you from… So I didn't want him here when I turned myself in, for his sake. It's… there isn't anything I can do. I'm locked out of my own systems, I don't know anything but… dreams and hallucinations. When I, when I came to the hunters, they hated me. Everyone except X, Dr. Cain and Sigma, for what I'd done when I wasn't… I don't have any control of the virus, either. I'd never…" He'd never allow something like this willingly, and they believed him. He couldn't believe it.

Surely they'd hate him, fear him, turn away from him. Surely telling them would make everything that had come before cease to matter, because now they knew the truth.

And yet they still trusted him. Still…

He swayed, and in an instant Axl was there, supporting him. It made him shake, and cling to the kid who wasn't a kid anymore."You aren't afraid of me?" The words were slow, hesitant. Surely they had to be afraid.

"You're the best hunter ever, except for X, but I'm going to be even better someday." So Axl didn't need to be afraid of Zero.

The first thing Zero did was bury his head against Axl's neck, to _hide, _because it was too much. To not be hated, to be accepted, to be, to be _safe_ after all this time?

Safe. Among friends, who knew what he was and didn't hate him for it. He didn't have to hide anymore.

That was when the relief hit him, and his arms loosened around Axl, his whole body seemed to relax. To unclench metaphorical muscles that had been tightened in anticipation of a blow, an attack. It felt as though he'd been curled into a ball, hiding away like a seed in a seedpod, and was now opening, uncurling. Reaching for the sun. He had friends, he had people who were closer than family, people who would protect him as he would protect them.

His eyes stayed closed, but it wasn't because he was trying to hide from the truth, anymore. No, it was because he was at peace, finally able to rest, finally…

Axl started as he realized that Zero was actually _asleep_. "Zero? Hey Zero?" He shook him a bit, starting to feel a little worried. "He just fell asleep."

"Emotional overload?" Alia looked sympathetic. "Well, we're already in medical. We can stick him in a capsule and make sure he's alright."

Except this wasn't sleep mode.

"Installation reboot, system configuration changes taking place: He was shut down so that he wouldn't be damaged by, or couldn't interfere with, whatever his body is doing." Lifesaver left Alia to look over the data and went to get better sensor equipment. "It might be a good idea for you to leave, sir." Just in case, Signas shouldn't be here.

"I'll try to send X over without attracting any attention." It would be better to have Alia observe the data from elsewhere. Also just as a precaution. "I'd guess that this was something triggered by a decrease in threat level?"

"I can't think of what else would have set this off right now. It might be possible to make it stop by shooting him nonfatally in order to raise the threat level, yes." If his body was changing because Zero no longer had to hide, or so he thought. Changing from stealth mode to… what? "My opinion is that doing so would be too much of a risk. If you give the order, sir, I can attempt something, but I wouldn't want anyone else present for that." Lifesaver was already well, _well _over the average life expectancy for someone in his position and knew it.

"No. If Zero was on the side of the mavericks, then 'a safe place' would be near Sigma. It's possible that he's been in stealth mode all these years, and that was why he didn't have access to his systems – including the systems we _need_. Ideally…" They all knew what the ideal was. "Provided he remains himself after this." The virus had the ability to warp minds, but if Zero truly _was _an ancient, a true android…

"I'm going to try to scan him again. Is that ok?" Axl remembered to ask.

"I don't think it will hurt." Alia looked at Signas.

"Wait until X arrives," Signas ordered, nodding at them both before leaving, at a carefully unhurried pace.

That left Axl to fidgit and silently curse all those stupid rules of society that made asking Alia if she wanted to kill time by making out a bad idea. She was really, really worried, and that meant she needed a distraction, and the fact she needed one so badly was why he couldn't give her one: how dumb was that? He was just on the verge of asking her anyway when X arrived.


	6. Because Magitech & Paranoia

_Cyber elves offer just so much potential for happy endings/AUs, really. Ah, magitech. And yet the games themselves, bar Classic, are quite tragic. Unless you go with the 'on a beach in cyberspace with fruity drinks, MSTing the efforts of their successors' interpretation of Zero series' ending and ZX series. Of course, cyber-elves without the purification program might be vulnerable to infection, since they are based on Zero and the nightmares, which are virus to begin with… _

_Still, an interesting AU would be one with cyber-elf 'ghosts' hanging around, as in more conventional ghost stories. At first, people would think it was just stories/superstition… Depending on how much of cyberspace the virus controls during X series, might be a 'hell but no heaven' scenario, meaning a lot of incentive to hang around… Still, it would be really easy to have, oh, Iris come back to life in a way justified by the rules of the series' technology, without needing to go, 'oh, she wasn't really dead, or, 'a wizard OC did it.'_

* * *

After a few quick words were exchanged with Alia, X went over to Zero's capsule. Axl recognized that look. It was the 'I would be yelling at you like a drill sergeant if I wasn't X and you didn't already know everything I was going to say about exactly why what you did was wrong, foolish and inconsiderate. So I will _look _at you as that conversation plays out in your head, until you get to the part where you apologize.'

But there was a trace of a rueful smile there, because X couldn't really blame Zero when he should have known that Zero would do something like this eventually. "I'm going to open the capsule," he informed Alia, since that was proper procedure.

"Go ahead." If he thought that was a good idea.

X put his hand on Zero's cheek. "Zero?"

"Isn't he still unconscious?"

"I know he is," X said. "That's why I'm saying this now: I am X, the last creation of Dr. Light." There was no response. "Well, that's probably a good sign." That whatever pre-programmed semi-autopilot was doing things to Zero's systems wasn't set up to do anything to the son of Dr. Wily's enemy. X lowered his hand to squeeze Zero's shoulder. "Rest well." X hoped he would.

"Warn me next time?" Alia said, a little irked. X had said he'd open the capsule, not that he'd invite any hidden assassination programs, or the virus' programming, to kill him.

"Sorry." X went to go look over her shoulder at the console. "Signas said Axl wanted to try scanning Zero?"

Alia nodded. "Signas said to leave it up to you." Neither Alia nor Lifesaver wanted to make the call. Yes, they needed whatever information they could get, but Axl… Axl wasn't fragile, or so they hoped, but if he broke there was no way to sweep up the pieces and he was _immune_. Not only was he almost irreplaceable, he was an S-ranked hunter. If Zero fell to the virus and took Axl with him? X would be hard-pressed to fight them both at once.

X looked up at Zero's second student, X's _kohei_. That would be the old word, in one of the languages Dr. Light had placed in his database. X had spent quite awhile looking through that language, since it was the one his family had spoken at home. "It's Axl's call."

"I want to. I mean, it's Zero. Zero's…" One of the things Axl had been built for, and his copying ability was almost a side effect (the combination of that analysis with his body's ability to reshape itself) was analyzing himself and others. Having a very, very good concept of the personalities of those around him as well as his own had let him know that something was terribly, terribly wrong with Red and the others even when the virus and Sigma were trying to hide its presence. He had been built to detect the virus in himself and others by knowing who those people were.

It grated on Axl's nerves to try to break that down onto words for other people. In his mind, Zero was 'Zero,' Alia was 'Alia,' _themselves_, and trying to categorize that, or put labels on it… just didn't _work_. People could be a lot of contradictory things at once, too, and…

The way Axl perceived the world was in terms of what his copy system perceived, since it was his copy system that made the systems that took in all the normal sensory data anyway. And his copy system dealt in terms of three-dimensional models, refractory indexes, percentage of chrome in an alloy, the amount of work it took to shape or change something, and converting vision, hearing, and perception of personality traits into that form? The best description was the human word 'synesthesia,' which was in Axl's internal dictionary, but he still didn't know the word because he'd never looked it up.

All that often left him wordless when he was asked to explain something involving another person, wanting to say something but not knowing how to put it. Sure, he could state Zero's temperature in degrees Kelvin, but then he'd have to try to explain that no, Zero's systems weren't actually overheating, but Axl was talking about his personality, and no, that didn't mean hotheaded, and then he'd ask what he did mean, and Axl didn't know another way to put it!

It just ended in headaches.

"Zero is Zero," X finished for him, and Axl nodded gratefully.

That was it exactly.

Normally Lifesaver was the one who said things like this, but since he wasn't here, Alia had to. "Provided he still is Zero." She was so worried, and there was nothing she could do but keep an eye on the monitor. "We didn't mean to set off anything."

"This may be a good thing. If Dr. Wily had anticipated that I would become immune, he would have made a stronger virus, and Zero may be immune for some of the same reasons I am. So, his programs may have assumed that Zero would only feel like the threat was over if the virus won."

Still sort-of-listening, Axl put his hand over Zero's chest and began trying to scan him. "Hey, it's easy now-Oh! That's it! I was right!" He stopped scanning to pump his fist. "I _knew _you two weren't all there! I bet you've got the same thing. That's so cool! I wonder if I can find Red?"

Axl vanished. Alia and X stared at the empty air where he'd been.

Alia would have said something along the lines of, "I'm going to strangle that kid," if it wouldn't have been embarrassing to be so immature in front of X. Not to mention that this was a serious situation.

X was thinking that if Zero was awake, he'd have had dibs on threatening to kill Axl, what with being Axl's commanding officer and all. Since it needed to be said and Zero wasn't awake to say it, X might have done so if he wasn't X and hadn't felt he needed to set a good example for Alia. He still found himself giving thanks for his hibernation. A century in a capsule had forced him to develop patience, and it was amazing how often he needed every scrap of it.

Weren't people supposed to have nice mornings after what had happened last night? Well, at least he didn't get hangovers, X thought as Axl reappeared, a ball of light floating over his shoulder.

"Look what I…" found, Axl started to say, only to shut up and realize that right, he probably shouldn't have just vanished without explaining first as he stared down the barrel of X's buster. "Uh, sorry about that?"

"We have teleport shields, Axl." So Axl had better have a good explanation ready for where he had just vanished to and why, not to mention _how_. If there was technology that could just punch right through a teleport shield (and X was pretty sure it had existed back in 20XX), then nowhere was safe. The world would panic and the mavericks would take advantage of the confusion. X's eyes gleamed with amusement for a moment, mostly to reassure Axl that X was pretty sure X wasn't actually going to have to shoot him, unless Axl did anything out of character enough to suggest that this was an imposter or Axl had gone maverick. Not that Axl would choose to become a host to the virus the way Lumine had, but while sometimes Axl's willingness to ignore red tape was useful in a plausible deniability sort of way, the Maverick Hunters were a paramilitary organization, with rules for this sort of situation.

It really was sad how often they dealt with 'virus-related unknown technology,' and how many people had died in the process of fine-tuning the hunters' procedures in this kind of situation. Handle with care and extreme paranoia, indeed… Not getting infected was the better part of valor, which was why X didn't consider himself especially brave. The thought of being infected terrified him, and knowing that he was at so much less risk than everyone else?

"I didn't mean to _teleport_." Axl would have warned them first, honest! "I didn't think it worked that way."

"Meaning you used a copied ability," copied from Zero while he was like this, "In the middle of HQ, without knowing what it does." Zero wasn't going to be very happy with Axl when he woke up. X wasn't either: they'd both taught him better than that.

"…Sorry." Axl scratched the back of his head sheepishly, elbow almost knocking into the floating ball of light.

"And what is that?"

"What's… Oh." Axl grinned.

* * *

X had never considered himself a pessimist. Sometimes it took a lot of effort to stay optimistic, in the face of wars that weren't wars but outbreaks, that weren't won but survived. Still, he'd fought to remember that there was more to life than endless wars, that sometimes they would be over for real, not just while the other side regrouped and respawned.

Coming back to life was something his enemies did, and lost Sigma. Something Zero did, which he was grateful for but he knew the cause. He hadn't been insane enough to think it could happen to anyone else.

After the failure of Doppler's vaccine, he'd adjusted to the idea that they might not be able to cure the virus. Stop it, yes, they had to stop it somehow, but those it had taken were probably lost. Sigma, the reploid he and Dr. Cain had created? As much as X wanted him back, he couldn't wish that on him. Having to remember what the virus had used him to do, the monster it had twisted him into? X was sick of his son being trapped in a living nightmare.

But this?

This was too good to be true. He wanted to believe that it was real, that it could be this easy, that Axl could just go and fetch Red and all that was left was a lot of rebuilding.

But decades of experience was screaming at him that this was too easy. That this was a _trap_. That love gave people strength, but it wasn't a magic talisman. It was a source of power, not a solution, and any source of power was dangerous, had to be properly channeled. Falling in love with Zero, well, technically letting Zero know that X had fallen in love with him years ago, wouldn't trigger something like this unless it had been set up in advance, and X had learned a little about how Zero's creator thought, over these years of observing his work.

This wasn't like him, this wasn't his style, and X knew that. So this obviously couldn't be what it seemed to be. What it had to be was a trap. The mavericks all thought X was just gullible, after all this time, and believing that there was such a thing as a magic want, believing in the power of love was something gullible, optimistic people did, now wasn't it? Bait a trap with something the victim wanted. Flavor a lie with something the victim wanted to believe in.

Zero wouldn't be rewarded for falling in love with the android he was meant to kill. He might have thought that their destiny wasn't so kind if he believed in destiny. There was no fate: the future was made by people. And Zero's creator was a cruel man.

He didn't let his worry show as he got the little ball of light into a virus scanner. The last free-floating energy beings he'd met were the nightmares that had formed out of the virus after Zero's second (or third?) resurrection. X still wondered how accurate that name was, if the nightmares had come about because of the unprecedented concentrations of virus or if they had something to do with Zero. All of the ones that could speak had reminded X of people he knew. Perhaps they were distorted personality data stored in the virus? Well, that would explain why none of them had been based on X.

X smiled when he told Axl that 'Red' was clean of the virus. It was hard not to smile at Axl's happiness, but if Red had been infected, then X would have known that this was bad. The suspense would have been over with. Things would have been back to normal. Just like every war, the only question was how bad it was going to be.

Having hope and _knowing _that it was almost certainly going to be crushed hurt. No wonder everyone thought he was insane for clinging to hope, insisting on it instead of just focusing on getting through each day, each war.

"What's wrong?" Alia asked him, pushing back her hair.

He looked at her, green eyes full of innocent confusion. What did she mean? "Well, I am worried about Zero," he said, as though that had just occurred to him. He had faith in Zero, after all. That Zero would return to him, would be okay.

"I _am _your spotter, you know." She'd watched him for years, it was her _job_. She could tell when he was pretending to be fine.

"…I almost wish Lifesaver was here, to play devil's advocate." Not that Lifesaver knew the entire story. He hadn't spoken to Serges or Isoc, might not know that they were dealing with an active enemy, one that was probably just as capable of creating new designs as the AI of X's capsules. If Light's remnant had created an armor for Zero, one his immune system didn't reject when the hunters still hadn't managed it, then could Wily's create something compatible with X?

Alia snorted. "As though that would keep you from worrying, of thinking of everything that can go wrong and how it's all your fault for existing." She put her hand on top of his. "You don't have to worry alone, you know." Except, she remembered, he did. Alia, Signas and Lifesaver might be resistant, might have lasted several times as long as they'd thought they would, but they weren't immune. If X told them what he knew and they were infected, then Sigma would know what X knew. Still, "You don't have to pretend to be strong for us all the time." Even if he and Zero had to put on a brave face for the world's sake, Alia certainly hoped X didn't consider her part of the public!

"I know. I'm sorry," he said, looking at her sheepishly. It made X look almost Axl's age – except Axl was almost middle aged now, for a hunter. He still often failed at acting like it. "It's not like I'm alone out there. It's good to hear your voice, to have that reminder that…" that she was waiting back at base. That she was still alive, that he'd managed to protect at least a handful of people? "That reminder of what I'm fighting for."

Alia couldn't help blushing, even though she'd known that X was off limits from the day she got here. X had gone through several spotters over the wars: at least two of them had been told to find other assignments because they'd developed a crush on X and were unable to be professional. Then Zero actually had started dating his spotter. Because of that, Signas had actually brought it up during her job interview, caught between not wanting to insult her by implying that she wouldn't be professional and knowing that X was a celebrity who really, really didn't need to be dealing with someone else's feelings right now, not when there was no way Zero would see a therapist and that left X to handle the fallout from Iris and Colonel. Not to mention Dr. Cain's failing health and the transition of command of the Maverick Hunters from Dr. Cain to Signas. Iris and Colonel had been Signas' younger siblings, so he felt almost as responsible for what happened as Dr. Cain did, even though Signas had been undercover well away from HQ and anywhere he might get infected.

On paper, Signas was the Supreme Commander. In reality, it was X and Dr. Cain that had founded Cain Labs, X and Dr. Cain that had established the foundation that funded the Hunters, and X that had trained Signas in running the logistics side of the organization while going on combat missions with the Seventeenth, trying to keep Zero from going back into his shell and spending as much time as he could with a dying friend.

X had needed help, not another burden. He still needed help, and she was glad she could provide it. He deserved it, and not just because of what he did for the world, how much he sacrificed. Because he was her friend.

X might be superhuman (Alia was a reploid engineer: she knew what normal was and barely a mission went by without another reminder that X was not it), but he was still… someone she wanted to protect.

She'd wanted to congratulate him on finally finding someone, or at least finally doing something about the partner he'd found years ago, but instead they went right into another crisis. She wanted to curse Zero's timing, but if they could really examine his systems now?

"I should go help Lifesaver and Signas interrogate Axl about what he read from Zero's systems," X said, after clearing his throat. He hadn't meant to make her blush or make this awkward.

"I'll do that," Alia said quickly. "You should stay here." With Zero. Because they didn't know what would happen and X was immune. Really, she shouldn't be in here with them.

She wished it was just because she wanted to leave the two of them alone.


	7. The End Again

_Because it has to be done in anything Sleeping Beauty-themed. Even Snow White._

* * *

Two weeks.

The costume theme X had picked didn't seem so funny anymore. A hundred years passing like a day? X had slept in his crystal coffin while the world fought desperately to survive. They couldn't afford for Zero to do the same. Not when Sigma had already realized Zero was absent, not when X and Axl could only be in so many places at once.

Thank goodness for Axl. One person couldn't defend this world alone. There was too much of it and too many mavericks. It was too easy for Sigma to send them false intel, for a maverick that hadn't been discovered yet to pull something to send one of them on a wild goose chase when the real attack was elsewhere.

It wasn't just the mavericks: the world wanted to know where Zero was. If it was X, they could have claimed he was taking another leave of absence to do research, but Zero wasn't a scientist. If they were studying him while people died, they'd have to have a reason, yes? And share their data. If Zero didn't wake up soon, they really would have to call people in to study him. To get that valuable data, while Zero's systems remained so open.

It _might _be possible to keep the fact Zero was the source of the virus from getting out, but X wouldn't bet on it, and it was more than a little wrong of him to care about Zero's reputation more than sharing the information that might let them develop a cure, but Zero was…

If they developed a vaccine, would it just turn into a new plague? How many years later? Would Zero wake up once the world had forgotten how often he'd saved it and only remembered him as an ancient evil, one they didn't need anymore?

X shook his head, telling himself to focus. Not to get a grip: the grip he had on his stylus was tight enough as it was. He had more than enough strength to snap it in two by accident, which wasn't something he advertised. The Quartermaster's department had sprung for alloy styli instead of cheap plastic ones because newbuilts often didn't know their own strength. Especially if they were custom models designed to be stronger than the average reploid.

Not as strong as X, though. As either of the androids. Oh, most of the Zeroth could break these styli if they tried, but they'd have to work at it.

X couldn't just go around breaking things because he was worried or distracted. Especially when he'd first woken up, nothing had been designed with an android's strength in mind. The world around him was fragile. People, even more so.

He hadn't yet tried the obvious thing. Either it wouldn't work and he'd look silly, which he didn't care about, or it would work and that would mean… what?

There was no way that Zero would notice X kissing him and that would wake him up when he wasn't noticing all the sensors, poking and prodding. Not unless someone deliberately programmed his threat alert or some other system that way. It wouldn't have occurred to Zero and Zero's creator would have done it that way only for the sake of mocking X.

He shouldn't have to take a deep breath before kissing someone he loved. He shouldn't be telling himself to bite the bullet and get it over with. But then, children shouldn't be murdered before their first birthday. X shouldn't kill.

He also shouldn't have to ask permission to kiss his love, but Zero was under the medical department's jurisdiction at the moment and X needed to set an example for Axl about not making sudden moves that would freak out the security. So he went to go find Lifesaver and tell him that X was going to try something that… "Sometimes it works in these cases," he said under his breath. Yes, he'd put it that way, because he didn't want to discuss the pros and cons of kissing with someone he'd seen under construction.

One of the advantages of being considered old and potentially senile was that he got to pretend to be shameless, like he just didn't realize how embarrassing it was to kiss someone in front of Alia and two of Lifesaver's drones.

He'd put his hands into Zero's hair first, holding his head, hoping that it might be the contact that woke him up, not the kiss.

It wasn't until X's lips had pressed against his, then pulled back a little, lingering more to give it time to work than because he was enjoying kissing someone while they were in a coma that he felt Zero's shoulder's twitch.

X knew that sliding his arms down Zero's body and pulling his friend against him might be a very bad idea. He could get stabbed. He could find out that this wasn't Zero. But as long as the kiss continued, he wasn't discovering any of those things. As long as this went on, Zero first nudging him with his lips as more of an acknowledgement and return of affection than a kiss, X could have hope.

Tentative arms wrapped around him, hesitated for a moment, and then pulled X away. X let them separate and opened his own eyes to meet confused green. "When did you get here?"

It wasn't that Zero didn't want to kiss him, but since X's head had been tilted to the side as they'd kissed, Zero could see Alia there. Why was X kissing him in front of someone else? Alia hadn't pushed Zero's comfort level that far. Not to mention that the last thing Zero remembered was… "There's no point to it anymore," he quoted, frowning into the distance.

"Hm?" X wondered, blinking up at him.

"There's no point to it anymore. I remember someone… I remember that was important. I was supposed to tell you that-" Zero said, and almost jumped back, startled when X's arms wrapped around him and his partner's lips claimed his, shutting him up before he could say anything else. Anything that might ruin this.

Zero blushed but didn't, couldn't force X away.

Not anymore.

* * *

_The end. _

_I was considering a downer ending, where the Non Veritas/Not True title was applicable because it really wasn't Zero that woke up, and genocide and tragedy ensued, but meh. This is really just an extended omake based around the Sleeping Beauty joke, so I figured I might as well let them have the fairy tale instead of being serious. What I did at the end of _Firebrand _is bad enough, right? _

_Anyway, this entire fic has been random crack and I take no responsibility for any OOC and such. While I'm disclaiming, I don't own Megaman either, X or otherwise. _


End file.
